WINDOWS 7

1.0 Introduction
Operating system is a program that controls the execution of application programs and also acts
as an interface or medium between the user and the computer hardware. Windows 7 is one of the
operating system that was developed by Microsoft. It was released in 2009 and greatly
improving on Vista. Actually, Windows 7 was existed in 2006 under a codename Blackcomb.
2.0 Design Principles
Windows 7 is a 32-bit/64-bit is a multitasking operating system for both

[1]

Intel and

[2]

AMD

microprocessors. It was designed based on the following principles;

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Extensibility (Layered architecture)

Portability
Reliability
Compatibility
Performance

2.1 Extensibility
Kernel layer is run in protected mode and it provides access to the Central Processing
Unit (CPU), by supporting interrupts, traps and threads. Executive runs in protected mode
above the Kernel layer and provide the basic system services. On top of the executive
layer, environmental subsystems operate in user mode providing different OS

[3]

APIs.

Modular structure allows additional environmental subsystems to be added without

affecting the executive.

2.2 Portability
Windows 7 can be moved to another platform with relatively few changes such as written
in [4]C and [5]C++.
2.3 Reliability
Hardware protection is used by Windows for virtual memory meanwhile software
protection mechanisms are used for operating system resources.
2.4 Compatibility
The applications that follow the [6]IEEE 1003.1 (POSIX) standard can be run on Windows
without apply some changes on the source code. Applications that created for previous
versions of Windows run using various virtual machine techniques.
2.5 Performance
All of the Windows subsystems can communicate with each other through highperformance message passing. The preemption of low priority threads enables the system
respond with faster to the external events.

3.0 System Component - Kernel

Kernel is a foundation for the subsystems and executive. It is also an object-oriented that uses
two sets of objects which are dispatcher objects and control objects. Dispatcher objects are
purposely to control dispatching and synchronization. There are four main responsibilities of
Kernel;
1.
2.
3.
4.

Thread scheduling
Interrupt and exception handling
Low-level processor synchronization
Recovery after a power failure

3.1 Process and Threads

The process has a virtual memory address space, information and an affinity for one or
more processors meanwhile the threads are the unit of execution scheduled by the
Kernels dispatcher. Each thread has its own state such as a priority, processor affinity
and accounting information.
3.2 Scheduling
A 32-level priority scheme is used by the dispatcher to determine the order of thread
execution. Two classes of priority are;
1. The real-time class contains threads with priorities ranging from 16 to 31.
2. The variable class contains threads having priorities from 0 to 15.
There are 3 characteristics of Windows 7s priority strategy. First is to give a very good
response times to interactive threads that are using the mouse and windows. Second is to
enable input-output bound threads to keep the I/O devices busy. Third is to computebound threads soak up the spare CPU cycles in the background. The scheduling process
can be occurred when a thread enters the ready or wait state, when a thread terminates by
the operating system or when an application changes a threads priority or processor
affinity.

4.0 Memory Management

3

Memory management is the task of subdivision that is carried out dynamically by the operating
system. In other word, it is the process of controlling and coordinating computer memory,
assigning portions called blocks to various running programs to optimize overall system
performance. Windows 7 is a multi-programming system, so the user part of the memory is
divided to more than two parts to accommodate multiple processes. The techniques that are used
are swapping, partitioning and paging. Paging involves logical address and physical address in
the process. Windows 7 emphasizes more on paging. In Windows 7, the virtual address
translation used several data structures within each process;
1. A top-level page directory containing 4 pages directory entries (PDEs) of size 8 bytes
that may each point to a page directory.
2. Each page directory contains 512 page directory entries that may each point to page
table.
3. Each page table contains 512 page table entries PTEs) size of 8 bytes.
4. Each valid PTE points to a 4KB page frame in physical memory.
These properties can be used when translating a virtual address pointer to byte address in
physical memory.
There are two functions that are used to enable the application to determine the virtual address at
which the memory is allocated which are VirtualAlloc and VirtualFree. VirtualAlloc is to reserve
or commit virtual memory meanwhile VirtualFree is to release the memory. An application can
use memory by memory mapping a file into its address space. For multistage process, the two
processes share memory by mapping the same file into their virtual memory.

5.1 Citation and References

5.1 Citation
[1]

Intel - A microprocessor.

[2]

- Advanced Micro Devices. A microprocessor for high specification computer.

[3]

- A set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications.

[4]

- Computer programming language.

[5]

- A general purpose programming language.

AMD
APIs
C
C++

[6]

IEEE 1003.1 (POSIX) Portable Operating System Interface.

5.2 References
1. http://www.csarchive.net/2013/09/windows-operating-system-architecture.html
2. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-my/windows/windows-help